We once hoped Paul Ryan was a real spending cutter instead of a spending growth cutter, but is now just a defender of Medicare spending growth, or something.
In other words, you are either going to vote for a Republican Welfare State in Romney/Ryan sans ObamaCare, or a Democratic Welfare State in Obama/Biden with it, but not for a Fiscally Conservative State, and certainly not for a Limited State.
The Investor's Business Daily doesn't seem to care that failing to cut the overall size of a program over time, adjusted for inflation, means you are not a fiscal conservative, here:
Media fact-checkers also complained about Ryan's charge that Obama is cutting $716 billion from Medicare to fund ObamaCare. Not true, they said. Medicare's growth is just being slowed.
But Obama achieves that slower growth by making real cuts in provider payments. And in any case, the media always and everywhere call a reduction in the rate of federal spending growth a "cut." So why suddenly charge Ryan with being misleading for using that same term?
In any case, Obama himself admitted that he's doing what Ryan says. In a November 2009 interview with ABC News, reporter Jake Tapper said to Obama that "one-third of the funding comes from cuts to Medicare," to which Obama's response was: "Right."
Reducing the size of government is different than reducing how much it grows.
Plans like the Penny Plan -- if they threw out the ever-rising baseline which makes government bigger every year because spending on programs must rise to accommodate increased population -- would work in a fiscally conservative sense because they essentially freeze programs in time and lop-off 1 percent annually until revenues grow enough to balance the budget.
But in no sense can even such a plan be construed as a limited government plan because such plans do not commit to paying off the debt, which by my calculations would take $850 billion annually or so for 30 years at 3.5 percent on top of balanced budgets each and every year over the period. This is how households used to work and no longer do, which is why government no longer does.
A country is only as good as its people. If Americans will not control their own spending, the government which represents them never will.
It begins with us, not with Barack Obama or Paul Ryan.
